That Most Precious Merchandise. Hannah Barker
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a notorious race.”98 As a result, Italian notaries included race along with gender, age, and name in slave sale contracts and other types of documents. Because race had a predictable place in the boilerplate language for slave sales, it is easy to compile a list of racial categories for slaves commonly used by notaries.
Data about the racial categorization of slaves in Genoa and Venice are presented in Figures 14 and 15 in Chapter 5. Russians, Caucasians (Circassians, Zichs, Abkhaz, Mingrelians), and Tatars made up the great majority of slaves in both cities. The label of “Other” hides a very diverse population. The following racial categories were assigned by the notaries to ten or more slaves: Albanian, Black, Bosnian, Bulgar, Canary Islander, Cuman, Ethiopian, Greek, Hungarian, Jewish, Moor, Saracen,99 and Turk.100 Racial categories assigned by the notaries to fewer than ten slaves were Alan,101 Armenian, Berber, Catalan, Goth,102 Laz,103 Libyan, Majar,104 Meskh,105 Mongol, Ruthenian, Sarmatian, Serb, Slav, Spanish, Uighur, and Wallach. A few racial categories (dovagus, raamanus, and cevia) do not seem to have equivalents in modern English. Indian and Chinese racial categories appeared only in Caffa and Tana.106
When Christian observers categorized mamluks, they used many of the same racial categories as the Genoese and Venetian notaries used for slaves held locally. Mamluks were categorized as Abkhaz, Albanian, Abyssinian, Bulgarian, Circassian, Greek, Mingrelian, Russian, Tatar, Turk, and Wallach.107 But Christian travelers also noticed mamluks from Germany, Hungary, Catalonia, Aragon, Italy, and Sicily. In 1482–1483, the Dutch traveler Joos van Ghistele met Nāṣir al-Dīn, a mamluk from Danzig, who was a treasury official of the sultan.108 In 1480–1483, Felix Fabri and Paul Walther de Guglingen met a mamluk named Sefogul, a German from Basel whose relatives Felix knew.109 Two mamluks, Conrad of Basel and an unnamed Dane, guided the traveler Arnold von Harff in Cairo.110
Unfortunately for both Italian notaries and Mamluk scribes, their racial categories were not adequate to describe the complexity and diversity of the people living around the Black Sea. Their hesitation in the face of a human reality that did not fit into neat categories is evident in the sources.111 Most authors of Mamluk biographical dictionaries did not mention race. When they did, they preferred the broad categories of Turk, Circassian, Rūmī, and Tatar. In a few cases, they disagreed: the amir Bahādir al-Minjakī was either Rūmī or Frankish, and the amir Jaqmaq al-Arghūnshāwī was either Circassian or Turkman.112 The early fourteenth-century sultan Baybars al-Jashankīr might have been a Turk, or he might have been the first Circassian ruler.113 Sultan Khushqadam was consistently identified as Greek, but there was debate over whether he, Lājīn, or al-Mu’izz Aybak was the first Greek sultan.114
Some Italian notaries left a blank space where race should have appeared in their slave sale contracts.115 Others put the burden of categorization on the seller, as with a slave “of Goth origin, as she seems to that same Iohannes [the seller] to be from Gothia.”116 The same was true for a slave “who is said to be from Russia”117 and a slave “of the race of the Russians, as it is asserted by the said slave woman, and whom I sell to you as being of the race of the Russians.”118 The Genoese notary Antonio di Ponzò borrowed the phrase “as is” (talis qualis est), a formula for disclaiming responsibility for a slave’s health, and repurposed it to disclaim knowledge of a slave’s race. A woman whom he could not categorize was sold “of race as is” (de proienia talis qualis est).119 Another notary hedged by describing a slave as “of the Abkhaz or another race.”120
Notaries also made mistakes in racial categorization. Sometimes they wrote one racial term, then crossed it out and replaced it with another one. Russians and Tatars were most often mistaken for each other in this way.121 In other cases, notaries gave two racial categories for a single slave: Tatar Russians, Tatar Alans, Tatar Turks, Tatar Circassians, Greek Circassians, Greek Russians, Greek Walachs, Russian Armenians, Russian Bulgars, Russian Circassians, Russian Bosnians, Wallach Bulgars, Bulgar Turks, Bulgar Tatars, Saracen Ethiopians, and Berber Moors.122 Some combinations can be explained by the dual significance of the term Greek as race or religion. A Russian Greek might therefore be of Russian race and Greek religion. What a notary meant by a Tatar Alan is harder to explain.
Slavery and Physical Appearance
Black Sea slavery was not white slavery. It was not black slavery either. Although both Latin and Arabic sources occasionally described slaves in terms of color, what they intended to convey was not necessarily the color of the slave’s skin. To grasp the significance of color in late medieval descriptions requires knowledge of late medieval theories of physiognomy and physiology as well as ethnography.
In Europe, state and ecclesiastical authorities first began keeping lists of people and their descriptions in the late fourteenth century.123 The initial purpose of the lists was to track undesirables, such as heretics and criminals, who moved from town to town, but they were quickly adapted for tax collection too. Because names were not sufficient to identify wandering heretics and bandits, the list makers added brief descriptions of their clothing, badges and symbols that they wore, marks on their skin, and their color.124 One of the most notable early lists was a register of slaves created in Florence in 1366.125 The Florentine register described slaves in terms of color, stature, and marks on the skin.
When late medieval texts referred to a person’s color, whether that person was free or a slave, they meant the color of the body rather than the color of the skin. According to the Galenic theory of humoral medicine, all living bodies were composed of a mixture of cold, hot, wet, and dry elements.126 In the human body, these elements mingled in the form of four fluids: blood, choler (yellow bile), phlegm, and black bile. Complexion (complexio) was the state created by a specific mixture of the four fluids. It had a range of meanings. Complexion could refer to an individual’s humoral state at a particular moment in time or to an individual’s innate and characteristic humoral balance. It could also be used to characterize groups: sex, age, race, climate zone, and astrological sign were all believed to affect complexion.
From a medical perspective, each human being was believed to have a unique personal complexion shaped by both nature and habit. This personal complexion could be affected at any given moment by many factors, including air, exercise, sleep, diet, excretion, and emotion. Each organ within the body also had its own complexion. Physicians sought to determine the personal complexion of each patient, the balance of elements and fluids that was normal for that particular body. Then they could intervene in various ways to restore and maintain the patient’s health by restoring and maintaining the correct balance of humors for that patient. The best complexion, from a medical perspective, was a well-balanced one.
Because complexion was an internal rather than external state, medical training required physicians to learn how to read their patients’ internal state through external signs. But because humoral balance affected the mind as well as the body, nonphysicians were also interested in reading the external signs to learn about internal qualities of personality and character. This was physiognomy. Over the course of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, as both ecclesiastical and state authorities placed increasing importance on listing and identifying people, the dominant meaning of complexion shifted from the internal, concealed blend of humors to the external, visible signs.127 The emphasis also shifted away from the unique humoral balance of the individual to the categories of complexion associated with categories of people. Strong emphasis on complexion as a permanent group state rather than a transient individual state emerged in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, at the same time as the new word race became widespread in the sense that we use it today.128
The principal colors attributed to the human body in Galenic discourse were white, red, yellow, and black, but a healthy body should be mixed in color, ideally a mixture of red and white.129 The poet Petrarch described his own color as “between white and dark brown” (inter candidum et subnigrum),